Contribution of fictitious forces to polarization drag in rotating media

TL;DR

This paper extends models of polarization drag in rotating media by incorporating inertial effects from fictitious forces, revealing their limited impact in low-frequency plasma conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to include inertial corrections from fictitious forces in polarization drag models, expanding beyond previous Coriolis-Faraday based theories.

Findings

Inertial corrections are derived from Lorentz and plasma dielectric models.

Fictitious forces have negligible impact on low-frequency polarization drag in magnetized plasma.

The Coriolis-Faraday correction is limited to specific frequency regimes.

Abstract

Models for polarization drag - mechanical analog of the Faraday effect - are extended to include inertial corrections to the dielectrics properties of the rotating medium in its rest-frame. Instead of the Coriolis-Faraday term originally proposed by Baranova & Zel'dovich, inertia corrections due to the fictitious Coriolis and centrifugal forces are here derived by considering the effect of rotation on both the Lorentz and plasma dielectric models. These modified rest-frame properties are subsequently used to deduce laboratory properties. Although elegant and insightful, it is shown that the Coriolis-Faraday correction inferred from Larmor's theorem is limited in that it can only capture inertial corrections to polarization drag when the equivalent Faraday rotation is defined at the wave frequency of interest. This is notably not the case for low frequency polarization drag in a rotating magnetized plasma, although it is verified here using the more general phenomenological models that the impact of fictitious forces is in general negligible in these conditions.